Monday, November 30, 2015

Podcasts, videos, live streaming, – our world is engulfed in
ways to send and obtain information.So,
the question on many college teacher’s minds is, why not utilize it?

Hence the birth of flipping classrooms, a way for teachers
to provide lecture information to students in new ways outside of the
classroom.That’s right, lectures would
take place outside of class time, freeing up the few hours a week you have with
students to complete hands-on activities, involving them first-hand in their
learning.

Flipping a classroom can be done by following these easy
steps:

Plan: Decide on a
lesson to flip and outline key learning outcomes to put together a rough plan.

Record: Instead
of teaching your lesson as usual, record a video or podcast of your
lecture.Make sureyour lesson contains all the elements you would
have if you were lecturing in person.Make it interesting and engaging to watch and listen to.

Share: Share the
video with your students and explain that its content will be discussed and
used in class.

Group: Consider
implementing discussion groups in your class in order to get students working
with the topics for that day.Give each
group a task and a goal to work towards.

Regroup:
Reconvene as a large group to share findings that students have discovered through
their discussions.Ask questions, offer
opinions, and encourage discussion.

Then, Review, Revise,
and Repeat!

While you might be thinking, “Well, that sounds great! Let’s
do this!”I do have to caution you on
some of the issues that you might face if you do decide to give flipping a try.

Firstly, it requires a lot of extra preparation on your
end.Teachers have to set aside extra
time in order to record, edit (if need be), and upload videos or podcasts of
their lectures for student access, or finding supplementary materials and
activities for students to work on outside of regular class time.It is recommended that you don’t include your
entire lecture in one video, but instead upload separate videos on each key
term you’re covering so students may easily go back and re-watch specific
content if they are confused or have questions.

Another thing to be aware of is the issue that students might have adjusting to the idea of a flipped classroom. Because the concept of a class time used for lecture has been ingrained in their expectations, students might resist the change--questioning why they attend class at all. You are also entrusting a large responsibility to them, trusting that they will take the time to watch or listen to your lectures outside of class. And if students do complete the lectures outside of class, they might also believe that they don't need to attend class for the hands-on/activity-based portion. Therefore, it's important for your to show research on how effective flipped classrooms can be when students put the effort forth. Click here for 10 published results supporting the benefits of flipped learning.

Monday, November 23, 2015

“Failure should be our teacher, not our
undertaker.Failure is delay, not
defeat.It is a temporary detour, not a
dead end.Failure is something we can
avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” – Denis Waitley

Mistakes are some of the most debilitating experiences
to face, but they are also some of the most incredible and profound
opportunities for learning.Despite this
realization and the constant recognition that failure is in fact, the best way
to truly learn, we continue to operate in an educational tradition that
encourages as few mistakes as possible.

In fact, I recently typed “fear of failure” into a
Google search and was rewarded with 141 million hits in .67 seconds.Sites that offer studies, statistics, and therapeutic
ways to overcome this incredibly prevalent phobia.This poses the question that I believe most
people have: if learning from mistakes is such a natural phenomenon, even one
that is encouraged in some instances, what happens when we put students in
situations where they are required to avoid making any mistakes at all costs?

By the time students arrive to college, they have an
ingrained sense of what education is about.For most, this means they attend class, pay attention, write notes, take
and pass assessments, and move on to a more elevated course.Once the class is completed, there is little
to no reflection on the material “learned” in it. If our focus remains on
outcomes and not the learning process itself, we will continue to lose sight of
the value of learning, and students will miss out on gaining a deeper
understanding and use of course material.However, in order to begin developing a more deeply dependent course on
learning, there are several things you’ll have to consider.

First, it means designing or redesigning a course that
provides students with multiple opportunities to participate in low-stakes
formative assessments.This means you’ll
have to work with corrective or prescriptive directions that demonstrate to
students how to learn from mistakes that are made.Ask yourself three questions concerning your
course and the things you hope students to gain from completing it.

How do I shift my focus to
celebrating mistakes rather than eliminating them?

How can I encourage and reward mistakes
for students that have demonstrated they have learned from the experience?

How many times should I allow
students to make mistakes and then demonstrate they have learned form it as a
measure of learning and success?

These
are questions that you must answer yourself using your own teaching philosophy
and the experiences you’ve witnessed in your classroom previously concerning
student struggle, involved learning, and demonstration of knowledge.

To
get you started, here are five ways to celebrate mistakes in your course (and
have students recognize, reflect, and learn from them):

Utilize
repetition.Break your projects or papers into pieces for
check-points to be made.These can be
done via peer evaluation or by providing a checklist for students to assess on
their own.Have students keep these
check-points as artifacts to discuss in a final reflection paper after
completing the project.Simply providing
students with the opportunity to review assignments through the lens of
reviewer can prove to be very insightful.

Give
several shorter exams/quizzes that are cumulative.This is a great alternative to a single midterm or final exam because it
considerably lessens stress placed on students to achieve highly on a single
assessment.Instead, repeated cumulative
testing provides more exposure to content and relies on students being able to
recall it for the entire semester, thus maintaining and building their understanding
of it.

Let
the class correct themselves.This can be done via polling, asking verbal
questions, or providing small group discussion time.Have students provide answers to a question
at the beginning of class, and then give them guided questions to consider in
small groups.These questions should
help them to consider the answers that were offered and make learned decisions
on which one is actually correct.This
provides students with the opportunity to not only find the correct answer, but
to determine why the other answers were incorrect.

Purposefully
make errors.This can be done in lecture, on PowerPoints,
on calculations, with polling or Clicker questions, whatever you prefer.Encourage students to catch your mistakes.
This creates a fun atmosphere where students are focused, reflective on
knowledge they’ve accumulated about a topic, and encouraged to participate.

Show
them what they will learn.At the beginning of the semester, provide
students with an assignment (either ungraded or part of a participation grade)
that they will be able to do at the end of the semester, but can’t yet.This sparks their interest about the course,
as well as their intrinsic motivation to discover what they will gain in order
to solve the problem that you’ve provided to them.Reference this assignment throughout the
semester during key points of the course so students can reflect on changes
they would make to their first attempt in order to reach success.Finally, at the end of the semester, have
them attempt the same assignment again.

Recognizing
how to effectively learn from and move past mistakes is an important life
skill.Fostering this concept in your
classroom will ultimately instill humility, responsibility, forgiveness, and
accountability in students, and encourage them to drop their fear of failure
and embrace an appreciation for the process of learning.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

An often heard complaint in college classrooms is that
from students pertaining to classroom exams.Students are appalled at the fact that the exams they encounter don’t
match up with lecture content word-for-word.Most often, this is due to the fact that professors would prefer their
exams to be more than just a simple test of route memorization, but more
towards the experience of learning and applying that knowledge to new
circumstances.

Bob Jacobsen, a Physics professor at Berkeley
University states that there are just a few simple questions you can ask your
students after they’ve completed an exam to encourage students to understand
the material so that they can apply it in new and effective ways.

He spends one class period re-doing the exam with the
students at the front of the class.For
each problem, he asks a series of questions that students must answer for that
problem in order to explain its purpose and relevance on the exam itself.They include:

1)Why did I ask this question?2)What were the big areas of
understanding I was trying to assess?3)What specific ideas, pitfalls, etc.
were involved?4)What does a good solution look
like?5)What needs to be commented on, what
can be written down, and what needs to be worked out?6)How were points awarded or taken
away?

Going
through these questions illustrates to students how the content studied
previous to the exam can be applied through understanding how to effectively
use it in new circumstances.Afterwards,
Jacobsen mentions that he usually sees a positive change in approach from
students in following exams and assessments.

Another
way for students to actively consider an exam and its content in relation to
course understanding is the following adaptation from Ed Nufler from Idaho
State University. It’s helpful to complete this exercise a day or two after the
exam has been handed back so students have had time to look over their answers,
and consider the areas that they struggled with.

Then,
ask students to bring their graded exams to class, and provide ten minutes or
so to answer the following thee questions on 3 x 5 notecards that you provide.

1)What did I do well on this test and
why?2)What did I do poorly on and why?3)What am I going to do about this
problem the next time?

You can make this exercise casual without requiring students to include their names on their cards, or you can include it as a small percentage of their grade for the course. This also provides you with opportunities to summarize comments of importance in following classes.

Monday, November 9, 2015

Examples not working?Jokes gone flat?Seinfeld references missed faster than you
can say, “No soup for you?”Don’t worry,
it’s not just you.

College faculty all around the
nation are struggling with teaching to the millennial generation.With a population steeped in YouTube videos,
Tweeting what they had for breakfast, and asking Siri what the weather’s like,
it’s no wonder you are beginning to hear nothing but crickets after your best
punch lines.

Here are some things you should
know about millennials in order to better connect with them.

Millennials
are used to being protected.They’re
used to their parents hovering over them or sweeping in to save the day.Terms like “helicopter” or “lawnmowerparents” are now truer than ever.Keep
that in mind.

Millennials
are team-oriented.Crowdsourcing is
something they’ve grown up with, so group work and relying on a team is nothing
new to them.

Millennials
are achievement-oriented.Keep in mind
that this generation above all others has been exposed to standardized testing
and education movement.This provides
them with an internalized value of results far above the process of learning
itself.

Millennials
are pressured.Due to this focus on
achievement, they’ve been feeling the pressure to be the best for quite some
time.

Not only is it important to
consider these elements in order to understand your students and the
generalizations about their generation, but it’s also important to reflect on
how we can move beyond these generalizations to build a pedagogical approach
that benefits our courses, our students, and ourselves.Consider these tips for teaching today’s
college student:

Get
to know your students.It’s impossible
to connect with students on any level until you gain an understanding of what
sort of knowledge and experience they are already bringing to your
classroom.Start out with a formative
assessment of some kind to allow students to share what they know, and what
gaps they may have in understanding your class content.

Show
your students ways to organize and apply knowledge.Millennials are used to getting information
at lightning speed, and usually in various different ways, so teaching how to
process all of this material is a good place to start.Incorporating different types of materials
for teaching each concept can be helpful as well.

Discuss
the value of failure.Because this
generation is so focused on achievement, they often lose sight of the ways in
which failure can work as a good learning tool.Provide opportunities in your classroom that are low stakes, and focus
on working on the process involved in learning a concept rather than the
product.These could be group
activities, discussion posts, or hypothesis-driven activities.Emphasizing the importance of the learning
process is also a good way to establish intrinsic motivation.

If you’re still
wondering what to do about those Seinfeld references whipping over your
students’ heads, well, let’s just say we know what your first homework assignment should be.